6 Rms, Erth Vu

Date:
December 15, 1996, Late Edition - Final
Byline:
By Dennis Overbye
Lead:

THE CASE FOR MARSThe Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must.
By Robert Zubrin with Richard Wagner.
Illustrated. 328 pp. New York:
The Free Press. $25.

Almost 25 years have passed since humans last set foot on the moon, and a generation of young Americans who believed they were witnessing the dawn of the space age have grown gray watching space shuttles fly nowhere in circles. In the post-Vietnam, post-cold-war, post-modern era we live in it is an accepted truism that the public will no longer tolerate grand, expensive adventures without a guaranteed bottom-line return to national security or the gross domestic product. ''Are we still a nation of pioneers?'' ask the authors of this book, one of the most provocative and hopeful documents I have read about the space program in 20 years. ''Do we choose to make the efforts required to continue as the vanguard of human progress, a people of the future, or will we allow ourselves to be a people of the past, one whose accomplishments are celebrated only in museums?''

Text:

Part history, part call to arms, part technical manual, part wishful thinking, ''The Case for Mars'' was written before last summer's announcement of evidence for past microbial life on the red planet made it the solar system's hottest tourist destination. It lays out an ingenious plan -- ''Mars Direct'' -- for humans to explore Mars within 10 years, using existing technology, for $20 billion or so. Robert Zubrin (formerly a senior engineer at Martin Marietta) and his colleagues invented the idea in 1990 out of frustration after NASA placed a $450 billion price tag on going to Mars. They have been barnstorming it ever since.

Mr. Zubrin compares NASA's approach to that of 19th-century Arctic explorers who set out for the Pole in expensive armadas of large ships stuffed with years' worth of supplies only to get stuck in the ice. The successful explorers traveled by dog sled and lived off the land. Martian explorers should also plan to live off the land, particularly the planet's thin atmosphere -- carbon dioxide, which can be turned into a methane-oxygen rocket fuel with the help of a very small amount of hydrogen. Being able to make fuel abroad for the trip home means astronauts will not have to lug it from Earth, and that means their spacecraft can be light enough to launch with existing rockets. No risky, expensive on-orbit assembly of ''Battleship Galactica'' spaceships. Economies follow like dominoes.

Part of the fun in reading this book is seeing a crack engineering mind operate. Mr. Zubrin knows how to make things work, and he sees possibilities and alternatives everywhere -- which he can't help explaining in occasional blizzards of numbers and acronyms. There are enough charts and graphs to tempt the serious student to try to design his own mission. Mr. Zubrin has already figured out the crew: two engineers and two scientists; no pilot-commander, no doctor (surely wishful thinking).

The first Martian homes will be of brick made from Martian sand. The planet's economy will be based on mining and selling deuterium (five times as abundant as on Earth) for use in nuclear reactors. At times Mr. Zubrin's can-do enthusiasm verges on chilling, as when he discusses possibly thickening Mars's atmosphere by melting the planet's polar caps and permafrost to make it more habitable (900 years -- no price tag): ''I would say that failure to terraform Mars constitutes failure to live up to our human nature and a betrayal of our responsibility as members of the community of life itself.''

When it comes to paying for all this, Mr. Zubrin is no less ingenious. One idea, worked out with the Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, would be for the Government to award cash prizes for the completion of various Mars tasks: $20 billion for the whole mission, $1 billion for a working fuel plant, and so on. If such an arrangement could lead to someone like Bill Gates owning or running Mars, that is not necessarily a bad thing by Mr. Zubrin, who is fed up with how things work on Earth. Bureaucratization, economic stagnation, overregulation, irrationalism, ''Malthusianism'' and the stifling of diversity, he says, are sapping our spirit. Just as the necessities and opportunities of frontier America supposedly drove progress in the 19th century, he believes, Mars would be a new frontier of enterprise and innovation, a new New World where humanity can renew itself. Such romanticism, of course, overlooks other aspects of the American West, like the contribution of the railroads, built by vast land give-aways and coolie labor, or the Indians, who were here first.

But one can agree that exploring Mars would be an exciting and noble thing to do, and that Mars Direct would be a cool way to do it. There may be natives on Mars, too, in the form of those microbes famously hypothesized last summer. What if we find them still making a living somehow, under the red sands? Would we have the right to colonize the planet, reprogram its climate and kill them? There is the mother of all snail-darter controversies, awaiting us in the 21st century.